Israel is Right_________Gail Walker.

Why I am 100% behind Israel____________________________Gail Walker

It’ll be no surprise to anyone familiar with this column that I am 100% behind the Israeli action against Hamas in Gaza.

For the militant Palestinians in Hamas, their malevolent twins in Hezbollah, and their even more malevolent arms-suppliers in Iran, the only solution to the ‘problem’ in the region is the termination of Israel.

That’s not misrepresentation. That’s root-and-branch the expressed view of those three ghastly partners in terror. It’s the very essence of Hamas. Stupid, unsophisticated, self-sacrificial — persuading the gullible to kill themselves by suicide bomb — and exploiting the lowest possible urges of a people certainly embattled and cornered.

It’s also the reason why Hamas was able to win elections in Gaza, routing the PLO under President Mahmoud Abbas, dubbed by one Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, as “a merchant selling Palestinians’ rights”.

So, when Israel is attacked, it’s the price that nation of interlopers must pay for being there in the first place.

If they retaliate, as any democracy would be expected to do, the hue-and-cry from the usual sources in the West is deafening.

How dare they fight back! If they weren’t there in the first place, they wouldn’t be attacked! Do they not know they should welcome Palestinian outrages as atonement for their rape of the Palestinian nation?

And other such guff.

Larded with the traditional, routine, by-now barely-concealed anti-Semitism of the Western Left and the British Labour movement in particular. Hence, one newspaper in this very city can publish a cartoon so breathtakingly racist and anti-Semitic that it’s no longer even commented on as out of the ordinary.

But am I wrong in thinking that the hue-and-cry has been rather less raucous than usual?

Certainly, there’s been little noise from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — and even Syria has been keeping its powder dry. Pakistan has been notably quiet also.

In other words, every country with an investment in the region — and which would normally have been among the first to rattle sabres — have kept their counsel. Why?

Maybe because of the woman suicide bomber, corseted with ball-bearings, who blew herself up outside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad on Sunday, killing more than 40 people.

Maybe because of the suicide attack, also on Sunday, which killed seven in north-west Pakistan.

Maybe because last week, four months after a local militia stood up to the Taliban and threw them out of their village, killing six of them, the Taliban murdered 40 people in Shal Bandal in north west Pakistan, many of them children, in a car bomb.

Maybe because they’ve all felt the consequences of dallying with the Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, Taliban mindset. And they all know who’s really calling the shots in Gaza. You know too. He was on TV delivering his Christmas message to Britain, courtesy of Channel Four.

I’m no war-monger. I’d like to see Mugabe hunted down for his crimes over a quarter of a century in Zimbabwe, not just those committed when he became an embarrassment to the Western Lefties. I was glad to see Saddam closed down — that’s one nation which isn’t keen to join any Iranian-backed scheme to capitalise on the sufferings of the people of Gaza.

And they are suffering, no question. As of today, however, there is equally no question that Hamas ‘soldiers’ are suffering more than civilians.

But as long as Hamas is sanctioned by anyone to hurl 200 rockets a day into towns where ordinary people live, it is insane not to expect Israel to. It’s their right and their duty to their own people.

Israel, remember, spent the whole of the first Iraq War showing restraint as Saddam’s SCUD missiles rained down on them.

But there’s a limit to provocation. And that limit was passed 12 days ago.

The Israelis didn’t learn tolerance from the industrial slaughter of Jews by Germany. The idea that because they were subject to a ‘final solution’ they would somehow be ‘nicer’ in future to people who wanted to obliterate them is both offensive and stupid.

What they learned was precisely what it is they will never tolerate again.

And if no one else does — ever — I for one will support that democracy.